Communication devices, such as smart phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), personal computers, and the like, are commonly used to receive, transmit, store, and display messages such as electronic mail (e-mail), short message service (SMS) messages, instant messages (IM), and even non-text messages such as voice-mail messages. Such communication devices may be provided with a messaging application executable on the device to manage such messages, allowing the user to receive messages; read (or otherwise peruse or hear the contents) of the messages; and respond to, save, delete, and/or file the message in a folder on the communication device, as desired. The messaging application typically provides a user interface that displays the messages stored at the communication device, or at least a subset of those messages, to the user in chronological or reverse chronological order.
The user interface typically displays on its top-level or home screen a counter listing the number of unread messages. A user may periodically glance at the home screen on his or her communication device to see if any e-mail messages have arrived since the last time they checked. However, the value of this counter is diminished by the large volume of e-mail received by a typical enterprise user: this counter is almost always non-zero. In fact, the number of messages is often measured in the dozens, and thus the relative importance of the counter to the user when it goes from, say, 52 to 53 is next to nil. In other words, it can become very difficult for a user to identify e-mail messages that are particularly important to them upon their arrival.